Igor Stechkin. Path to fame
In the ranks of the Soviet gunsmith designers, you can find a large number of bright names that are forever inscribed in history weapons world. But there is a man among them whose developments and principles of work have almost always been a half step or a whole step ahead of similar developments by contemporaries. It is worth noting that non-standard approaches and the brightness of thought that were inherent in the Soviet armory school, allowed with enviable regularity to create unique types of weapons. At the same time, some types of weapons turned out to be so outstanding that they ceased to be officially named and named only by the name of the designer who created them. This happened with the Stechkin automatic pistol (APS), which was simply nicknamed the "Stechkin."
Igor Stechkin was born 15 November 1922, in the city of Alexin, Tula region. The future famous Soviet gunsmith designer was born into a noble family from which a large number of famous people emerged. For example, his grandfather Sergey Yakovlevich Stechkin (who wrote under the pseudonym Solomin) was a science fiction writer, a journalist. His uncle Boris Sergeevich Stechkin was one of those who designed the Lebedev tank (Tsar-tank), after the revolution he worked as deputy director of TsAGI, was the author of the theory of jet engines. During the Great Patriotic War, he worked in the "Tupolev sharag". In the future, he became the winner of the Stalin and Lenin Prizes Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
The father of the future designer, Yakov Sergeyevich Stechkin, was a well-known surgeon, took part in the First World War. During World War II, he was a leading surgeon in Tula, in the winter of the 1941 of the year during the battle for Moscow one day, he and his assistant performed about 300 operations. Here in such a family, represented by a large number of respected and leaving a mark in the history of people, Igor Yakovlevich Stechkin was born, who managed to overshadow them with his fame, turning the surname Stechkin into a synonym for the legendary and trouble-free small arms.
Despite the fact that the young Igor Stechkin clearly showed the presence of weapon talent, the relationship with the military service and the army in general at Stechkin did not work out. In 1941, he was released from military service due to poor eyesight. It is precisely this that Igor Stechkin will always differ in the future from most of his fellow gunsmiths - with large, sometimes dark glasses and a frowning look. After the failure of military service, the future gunsmith returns to his native Tula, to which his family moved in full strength in 1935. Here in Tula he continued his studies at the Tula Mechanical Institute.
The outbreak of war has made adjustments to his learning process. At the very beginning of the war, Stechkin moved to Izhevsk, where he studied at the evacuated Moscow Bauman Higher Technical School, and at the same time he worked as a grinder at a local motorcycle factory. Stechkin returned to his native Tula only at the end of 1942 of the year. And he graduated from the Tula Mechanical Institute in February 1948 of the year. The graduation project of the future famous Soviet designer-gunsmith wrote on the topic "Self-loading pistol caliber 7,65 mm." The consultant of his project was N. F. Makarov.
It is worth noting that Igor Stechkin was completely and completely absorbed in training at the institute’s weapons and machine-gun department. Suddenly, already during the exam, it became clear to everyone that the drawings submitted by Stechkin for examination to the members and experts of the examination committee of the pistol are fundamentally different from the previously produced small arms. One of the members of the examination committee, examining the submitted drawings, told the young designer that such a gun would not be able to and will not shoot. The young designer Igor Stechkin responded to this quite simply: he took a pre-assembled prototype out of his pocket and fired 3 with blank cartridges at the ceiling. After such a “performance” before the commission, Stechkin was sent home with an “excellent” mark and a red diploma. And the same gun, which Igor Yakovlevich impressed with the examination commission, is still in the museum of Tula State University. After the completion of the university, Stechkin was assigned to TsKB-14, where he began developing small arms. In May 1948, he was enlisted there as an engineer.
In all the projects of the designer Igor Stechkin, in addition to ease of operation, reliability and other common parameters, there has always been laid one more constant principle - elegance. According to the designer gunsmith himself, an ugly weapon simply could not shoot. In this, he was similar to the Soviet aircraft designer Tupolev, who said that an ugly plane would not fly. Igor Stechkin adhered to this point of view until the last moment, while he still could continue to work in the development of small arms.
Igor Stechkin's desire for grace in the development of small arms made this engineer perhaps the first domestic designer who turned his attention to the layout of the weapon, which is known today as “bullpup”. In this scheme, the trigger is located in front of the store and the trigger mechanism. Through the use of this layout it was possible to easily reduce the overall length of the weapon, without losing the effectiveness of shooting and accuracy. Experiments with this scheme were conducted before the Second World War, but it could not reach widespread use until the end of the 1970s. During these years, work was carried out in different countries around the world to create assault rifles made exactly according to the bull pap scheme. The most famous example of such a weapon was the Steyr AUG rifle, which was released in 1977 year and was created by the Austrian company Steyr-Daimler-Puch. It should be noted that in those years, Igor Stechkin worked on rifles of a similar scheme, who managed to succeed quite well in developing them.
The AK-1974 Kalashnikov assault rifle, adopted by the Soviet army in 74, put a kind of line under a whole era in the development of small arms. Despite significant improvements and reliability that has become traditional for the machine gun, AK-74 designers could not get rid of its main drawback - low accuracy of fire when firing in bursts. It was precisely the low accuracy of fire that allowed in the 1981 year to initiate a whole series of research and development in the USSR as part of the project of a new, promising machine gun, which received the working title Abakan.
TKB-0146
The assembled percussion team of domestic gunsmith designers began to work on the project with a high degree of enthusiasm, and already after 3, in 1984, the first prototypes were presented for testing by the military. Among the models presented for testing, almost all were performed according to the standard scheme: the store and the trigger are in front, the trigger is behind. And Igor Stechkin approached the problem more creatively; his TKB-0146 was the only model made according to the bullpup scheme. This model was also included in the test program "Abakan".
Among other things, Stechkin succeeded in not only fulfilling all the test conditions for the new assault rifle, but also successfully solving the main problem for the assault rifles of this scheme: the ejection of the spent cartridges occurred very close to the shooter’s eyes. As a result, the model presented by Igor Stechkin not only increased the accuracy of firing bursts, but also solved the problem with the arrival in the face of the arrow of the cartridges. The designer solved this problem ingeniously. His machine gun had a scheme in which the spent cartridges were thrown into a specially designed hole that was above the fire control handle. Moreover, the gunsmith satisfied the conditions of the competition, which ordered to achieve a two-stage supply of the cartridge in the chamber.
At the same time, TKB-0146 had practically no recoil when firing, and in automatic mode, the machine showed fantastic accuracy. However, due to either fear of modifying this sample or because of the unusual scheme, the machine gun was “hacked” during the final tests. For adoption, the machine was recommended design Nikonov, known today as the AN-94. Many experts today call such a decision erroneous, as the option presented by Igor Stechkin was no worse, and in terms of ease of operation even better.
However, the most famous, popular and sought-after worldwide development of Igor Stechkin was destined to become his automatic pistol APS, which he created at the dawn of his design career. Hardly, starting work on him in the distant 1948 year, the designer thought about how successful, reliable and powerful his gun would turn out. The pistol created by Stechkin forever entered the history of the Soviet rifle weapon school, along with the TT pistol and the Kalashnikov assault rifle.
Already in the 1951 year, a new pistol chambered for the 9x18 mm was adopted by the Soviet army under the designation APS. For the creation of a pistol Stechkin was awarded the prestigious Stalin Prize. His gun could easily fire both in single shots and bursts. The new pistol was intended primarily for the arming of officers, sergeants and soldiers of certain army specialties, as well as crews of armored combat vehicles, which the AK machine gun or SKS carbine did not rely on under the charter. In this case, even then, the military rightly believed that the capabilities of the PM pistol would not be enough for self-defense in the event of military clashes with a likely adversary.
Stechkin automatic pistol works under the scheme of using recoil with a free gate. The gun could be equipped with a plastic or wooden holster-butt. It was needed not so much for storing a pistol, but for more accurate shooting when firing at long distances, as well as to reduce dispersion when conducting automatic fire. In order to achieve more or less heap shooting in automatic mode, it is worth holding the MTA with two hands and firing only in short bursts. This is necessary because the gun significantly lifts up after the third shot. Automatic fire while holding the MTA with only one hand with acceptable dispersion can only be conducted at a distance of 5 meters. In the pistol grip there is a mechanism for slowing down the rate of fire, which also performs the function of the self-timer, which also contributes to the stability of the weapon when firing. As a result, the rate of fire from the MTA was 700-750 shots per minute.
In Stechkin's automatic pistol, a rather rare solution for pistols was used - a magazine with a double-row cartridge output. The cartridges themselves are located in it in two rows, in a checkerboard pattern. This system requires the right combination of all elements, such as the shape of the magazine, the chamfer angle of the cartridge, as well as the very precise manufacturing of the components. In this case, a rather big obstacle was the form of the cartridge itself - 9x18 mm. Igor Stechkin spent considerable effort on the design and bringing to mind the smooth functioning of the parts that were responsible for feeding the cartridges. As a result, he managed to achieve reliability in the operation of the gun even in extreme conditions of its operation. Even today, the largest American and European manufacturers of short-barreled weapons use more reliable, single-row pistol magazines when serving, which are inconvenient in equipment and more difficult to manufacture.
"Destruction" of the gun and the overall reliability of the scheme came to the liking of the military. The APS turned out to be so popular a pistol that even the leader of the Cuban revolution, Ernesto Che Guevara, and later Fidel Castro himself, acquired these pistols during the years of Soviet-Cuban friendship. Andrei Kolokoltsev, a veteran of the Afghan war and a military expert, in an interview with the journalists of the TV channel Zvezda recalled some of the features of this gun: “The barrel is good, but due to its weight and size, you must get used to using it. Army requirements suggested that you must carry a pistol with four fully equipped 20 magazines each, which was quite hard. It was especially difficult to get used to firing intensive, fast when it was necessary to react immediately - the pistol hilt seemed inconvenient, but they got used to it, and only then thanked the designer of the pistol, because in cases of close contact with the enemy soldiers, the PM-armed fighters had much less chances of success than those that were armed with Stechkin pistols. "
Especially for special units at the end of 1960-ies, a “silent” version of the pistol was created, designated APB (automatic silent pistol), in 1972, this pistol was adopted for special purposes. The new model differed from the ordinary APS by a removable silencer, as well as minor modifications for its attachment. It was APB that for many years remained a reliable ally and friend for the fighters of the Soviet special forces. Its reliability, accuracy of shooting and a large 20 magazine of cartridges made it possible to effectively fire at distances that were inaccessible to the PM. The reliability of the pistols created by Igor Stechkin has been noted in dozens of states around the globe, and the operation of these pistols, despite a rather solid age, continues to this day. The divisions of the GRU special forces, airborne troops, as well as many special forces use the Stechkin pistol and do not want to change it for other types of small arms.
Igor Stechkin has managed to become a symbol of the national arms school, along with another famous designer Mikhail Kalashnikov, and his famous pistol is one of the most recognizable types of small arms all over the world, which alone gives the shooter a sense of reliability and guarantees the solution of any tasks assigned to him . In total, the designer’s account had more than 50 inventions and 60 developments. Igor Yakovlevich Stechkin worked in the arms field until the very last days of his life. He passed away on November 28 2002, at the age of 80. The well-known designer gunsmith was buried in the city of Tula in the Smolensk (First City) cemetery.
Information sources:
http://tvzvezda.ru/news/forces/content/201503031755-als1.htm
http://ria.ru/spravka/20121115/910596863.html
http://www.armoury-online.ru/articles/pistols/russia/aps
http://ohranka.com/2013/11/игорь-яковлевич-стечкин-и-его-легенда
Igor Stechkin was born 15 November 1922, in the city of Alexin, Tula region. The future famous Soviet gunsmith designer was born into a noble family from which a large number of famous people emerged. For example, his grandfather Sergey Yakovlevich Stechkin (who wrote under the pseudonym Solomin) was a science fiction writer, a journalist. His uncle Boris Sergeevich Stechkin was one of those who designed the Lebedev tank (Tsar-tank), after the revolution he worked as deputy director of TsAGI, was the author of the theory of jet engines. During the Great Patriotic War, he worked in the "Tupolev sharag". In the future, he became the winner of the Stalin and Lenin Prizes Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
The father of the future designer, Yakov Sergeyevich Stechkin, was a well-known surgeon, took part in the First World War. During World War II, he was a leading surgeon in Tula, in the winter of the 1941 of the year during the battle for Moscow one day, he and his assistant performed about 300 operations. Here in such a family, represented by a large number of respected and leaving a mark in the history of people, Igor Yakovlevich Stechkin was born, who managed to overshadow them with his fame, turning the surname Stechkin into a synonym for the legendary and trouble-free small arms.
Despite the fact that the young Igor Stechkin clearly showed the presence of weapon talent, the relationship with the military service and the army in general at Stechkin did not work out. In 1941, he was released from military service due to poor eyesight. It is precisely this that Igor Stechkin will always differ in the future from most of his fellow gunsmiths - with large, sometimes dark glasses and a frowning look. After the failure of military service, the future gunsmith returns to his native Tula, to which his family moved in full strength in 1935. Here in Tula he continued his studies at the Tula Mechanical Institute.
The outbreak of war has made adjustments to his learning process. At the very beginning of the war, Stechkin moved to Izhevsk, where he studied at the evacuated Moscow Bauman Higher Technical School, and at the same time he worked as a grinder at a local motorcycle factory. Stechkin returned to his native Tula only at the end of 1942 of the year. And he graduated from the Tula Mechanical Institute in February 1948 of the year. The graduation project of the future famous Soviet designer-gunsmith wrote on the topic "Self-loading pistol caliber 7,65 mm." The consultant of his project was N. F. Makarov.
It is worth noting that Igor Stechkin was completely and completely absorbed in training at the institute’s weapons and machine-gun department. Suddenly, already during the exam, it became clear to everyone that the drawings submitted by Stechkin for examination to the members and experts of the examination committee of the pistol are fundamentally different from the previously produced small arms. One of the members of the examination committee, examining the submitted drawings, told the young designer that such a gun would not be able to and will not shoot. The young designer Igor Stechkin responded to this quite simply: he took a pre-assembled prototype out of his pocket and fired 3 with blank cartridges at the ceiling. After such a “performance” before the commission, Stechkin was sent home with an “excellent” mark and a red diploma. And the same gun, which Igor Yakovlevich impressed with the examination commission, is still in the museum of Tula State University. After the completion of the university, Stechkin was assigned to TsKB-14, where he began developing small arms. In May 1948, he was enlisted there as an engineer.
In all the projects of the designer Igor Stechkin, in addition to ease of operation, reliability and other common parameters, there has always been laid one more constant principle - elegance. According to the designer gunsmith himself, an ugly weapon simply could not shoot. In this, he was similar to the Soviet aircraft designer Tupolev, who said that an ugly plane would not fly. Igor Stechkin adhered to this point of view until the last moment, while he still could continue to work in the development of small arms.
Igor Stechkin's desire for grace in the development of small arms made this engineer perhaps the first domestic designer who turned his attention to the layout of the weapon, which is known today as “bullpup”. In this scheme, the trigger is located in front of the store and the trigger mechanism. Through the use of this layout it was possible to easily reduce the overall length of the weapon, without losing the effectiveness of shooting and accuracy. Experiments with this scheme were conducted before the Second World War, but it could not reach widespread use until the end of the 1970s. During these years, work was carried out in different countries around the world to create assault rifles made exactly according to the bull pap scheme. The most famous example of such a weapon was the Steyr AUG rifle, which was released in 1977 year and was created by the Austrian company Steyr-Daimler-Puch. It should be noted that in those years, Igor Stechkin worked on rifles of a similar scheme, who managed to succeed quite well in developing them.
The AK-1974 Kalashnikov assault rifle, adopted by the Soviet army in 74, put a kind of line under a whole era in the development of small arms. Despite significant improvements and reliability that has become traditional for the machine gun, AK-74 designers could not get rid of its main drawback - low accuracy of fire when firing in bursts. It was precisely the low accuracy of fire that allowed in the 1981 year to initiate a whole series of research and development in the USSR as part of the project of a new, promising machine gun, which received the working title Abakan.
TKB-0146
The assembled percussion team of domestic gunsmith designers began to work on the project with a high degree of enthusiasm, and already after 3, in 1984, the first prototypes were presented for testing by the military. Among the models presented for testing, almost all were performed according to the standard scheme: the store and the trigger are in front, the trigger is behind. And Igor Stechkin approached the problem more creatively; his TKB-0146 was the only model made according to the bullpup scheme. This model was also included in the test program "Abakan".
Among other things, Stechkin succeeded in not only fulfilling all the test conditions for the new assault rifle, but also successfully solving the main problem for the assault rifles of this scheme: the ejection of the spent cartridges occurred very close to the shooter’s eyes. As a result, the model presented by Igor Stechkin not only increased the accuracy of firing bursts, but also solved the problem with the arrival in the face of the arrow of the cartridges. The designer solved this problem ingeniously. His machine gun had a scheme in which the spent cartridges were thrown into a specially designed hole that was above the fire control handle. Moreover, the gunsmith satisfied the conditions of the competition, which ordered to achieve a two-stage supply of the cartridge in the chamber.
At the same time, TKB-0146 had practically no recoil when firing, and in automatic mode, the machine showed fantastic accuracy. However, due to either fear of modifying this sample or because of the unusual scheme, the machine gun was “hacked” during the final tests. For adoption, the machine was recommended design Nikonov, known today as the AN-94. Many experts today call such a decision erroneous, as the option presented by Igor Stechkin was no worse, and in terms of ease of operation even better.
However, the most famous, popular and sought-after worldwide development of Igor Stechkin was destined to become his automatic pistol APS, which he created at the dawn of his design career. Hardly, starting work on him in the distant 1948 year, the designer thought about how successful, reliable and powerful his gun would turn out. The pistol created by Stechkin forever entered the history of the Soviet rifle weapon school, along with the TT pistol and the Kalashnikov assault rifle.
Already in the 1951 year, a new pistol chambered for the 9x18 mm was adopted by the Soviet army under the designation APS. For the creation of a pistol Stechkin was awarded the prestigious Stalin Prize. His gun could easily fire both in single shots and bursts. The new pistol was intended primarily for the arming of officers, sergeants and soldiers of certain army specialties, as well as crews of armored combat vehicles, which the AK machine gun or SKS carbine did not rely on under the charter. In this case, even then, the military rightly believed that the capabilities of the PM pistol would not be enough for self-defense in the event of military clashes with a likely adversary.
Stechkin automatic pistol works under the scheme of using recoil with a free gate. The gun could be equipped with a plastic or wooden holster-butt. It was needed not so much for storing a pistol, but for more accurate shooting when firing at long distances, as well as to reduce dispersion when conducting automatic fire. In order to achieve more or less heap shooting in automatic mode, it is worth holding the MTA with two hands and firing only in short bursts. This is necessary because the gun significantly lifts up after the third shot. Automatic fire while holding the MTA with only one hand with acceptable dispersion can only be conducted at a distance of 5 meters. In the pistol grip there is a mechanism for slowing down the rate of fire, which also performs the function of the self-timer, which also contributes to the stability of the weapon when firing. As a result, the rate of fire from the MTA was 700-750 shots per minute.
In Stechkin's automatic pistol, a rather rare solution for pistols was used - a magazine with a double-row cartridge output. The cartridges themselves are located in it in two rows, in a checkerboard pattern. This system requires the right combination of all elements, such as the shape of the magazine, the chamfer angle of the cartridge, as well as the very precise manufacturing of the components. In this case, a rather big obstacle was the form of the cartridge itself - 9x18 mm. Igor Stechkin spent considerable effort on the design and bringing to mind the smooth functioning of the parts that were responsible for feeding the cartridges. As a result, he managed to achieve reliability in the operation of the gun even in extreme conditions of its operation. Even today, the largest American and European manufacturers of short-barreled weapons use more reliable, single-row pistol magazines when serving, which are inconvenient in equipment and more difficult to manufacture.
"Destruction" of the gun and the overall reliability of the scheme came to the liking of the military. The APS turned out to be so popular a pistol that even the leader of the Cuban revolution, Ernesto Che Guevara, and later Fidel Castro himself, acquired these pistols during the years of Soviet-Cuban friendship. Andrei Kolokoltsev, a veteran of the Afghan war and a military expert, in an interview with the journalists of the TV channel Zvezda recalled some of the features of this gun: “The barrel is good, but due to its weight and size, you must get used to using it. Army requirements suggested that you must carry a pistol with four fully equipped 20 magazines each, which was quite hard. It was especially difficult to get used to firing intensive, fast when it was necessary to react immediately - the pistol hilt seemed inconvenient, but they got used to it, and only then thanked the designer of the pistol, because in cases of close contact with the enemy soldiers, the PM-armed fighters had much less chances of success than those that were armed with Stechkin pistols. "
Especially for special units at the end of 1960-ies, a “silent” version of the pistol was created, designated APB (automatic silent pistol), in 1972, this pistol was adopted for special purposes. The new model differed from the ordinary APS by a removable silencer, as well as minor modifications for its attachment. It was APB that for many years remained a reliable ally and friend for the fighters of the Soviet special forces. Its reliability, accuracy of shooting and a large 20 magazine of cartridges made it possible to effectively fire at distances that were inaccessible to the PM. The reliability of the pistols created by Igor Stechkin has been noted in dozens of states around the globe, and the operation of these pistols, despite a rather solid age, continues to this day. The divisions of the GRU special forces, airborne troops, as well as many special forces use the Stechkin pistol and do not want to change it for other types of small arms.
Igor Stechkin has managed to become a symbol of the national arms school, along with another famous designer Mikhail Kalashnikov, and his famous pistol is one of the most recognizable types of small arms all over the world, which alone gives the shooter a sense of reliability and guarantees the solution of any tasks assigned to him . In total, the designer’s account had more than 50 inventions and 60 developments. Igor Yakovlevich Stechkin worked in the arms field until the very last days of his life. He passed away on November 28 2002, at the age of 80. The well-known designer gunsmith was buried in the city of Tula in the Smolensk (First City) cemetery.
Information sources:
http://tvzvezda.ru/news/forces/content/201503031755-als1.htm
http://ria.ru/spravka/20121115/910596863.html
http://www.armoury-online.ru/articles/pistols/russia/aps
http://ohranka.com/2013/11/игорь-яковлевич-стечкин-и-его-легенда
Information